Creative Writing in a Black Feminist Context: Therapeutic Possibility

This project proposes that creative writing in a Black Feminist context uniquely helps engender an abolitionist mode of world-building largely absent from therapeutic discourse. This is examined using a creative analytical practice with writing as a method of inquiry. A review of Black Feminist literature in relation to creative writing, therapeutics, and abolition grounds writing processes that include composition of a three-act play and theoretical and contextual analyses staged between Acts.

Creative writing praxis is theorised by linking it to literature on Black Feminism, abolition, and therapeutics. The research creates ground for more expansive ways of thinking about the possibilities of knowledge production and practices of freedom offered by Black Feminist practices in creative writing. It adds to a therapeutic discourse that has not included an engagement with Black Feminism or consideration of its potential for the field of practice.

"Toward the end of the World produced by reason, the Black Feminist poet peers beyond the horizon of thought..." (Da Silva 2014)

This project examines creative writing in the context of epistemologies and practices of Black Feminism which create an important, different grounding for abolitionist therapeutics. It engages Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP) as a theoretical field and range of practices and focuses on the possibilities of Black Feminist Poethics [da Silva 2014].

The research builds on my previous work exploring CWTP through registers of Black life to identify possibilities for knowledge production within the gaps in its theorising [Taylor 2023, 2021]. I draw on my professional practice as a therapist and writer in transnational Black feminist contexts to explore writing as a practice contributing to a reformulation and reshaping of therapeutic praxis.